Smile! It's all on your camera phone now

TEN Augusts ago the Daily Express told its readers about a “remarkable new gadget that could see off the holiday postcard: the Nokia 7650, a mobile phone with a built-in digital camera that can beam pictures instantly across the world.”

Was it really only 10 years ago that people didn’t have a camera with them all the time? Camera phones have given us a new vantage point on the world because they are always there at the decisive moment.

The technology has also made other people’s photography less painful to endure.

Our friends’ holiday album used to be a tool of oppression. Now their damnable snaps just go on the internet where we can pretend to look at them and they can pretend to look at ours.

It’s hard to believe that in 2002 phone-makers were worried that camera phones wouldn’t catch on. WAP, a kind of Teletext for cellphones, had just flopped.

The marketeers pushed hard.

The technology has also made other people’s photography less painful to endure

David Beckham was hired to be the face of Vodafone’s camera phones on top of his onerous duties as the face of nearly everything else.

The new Bond film Die Another Day had a Sony Ericsson P800 phone infiltrated into the screenplay. Not to worry.

By 2006 half of all mobile phones had built-in cameras. Now it’s hard to buy a mobile without one. Camera phones are a huge business. So who got all the money?

Camera phones are built on British technology.

The late Professor Peter Denyer’s team at Edinburgh University developed the key component: image-sensor

chips based on CMOS transistors that sip electric current rather than guzzle it.

Professor Denyer was the model of an entrepreneurial scientist and he left a respectable estate of £1.7million.

On the other hand Beckham was paid a reported £2million just for promoting the phones and Facebook has paid a billion dollars for Instagram, a small business that developed novelty software to make your phone pictures look like old Polaroids.

Young people who are wondering whether to go into engineering, celebrity sports or internet bubbles should take note.

Media pundits like to say that with camera phones we are all embedded journalists. Yes but we are not embedded with special forces deep behind enemy lines.

We are embedded in our own tiny lives with our tipsy friends. The phone pictures we take and shovel on to the net are of strictly local interest.

AND then something happens. The Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 was the first world event where camera phones

delivered the earliest and the best news photos.

By 2005 the phones were ubiquitous and the horror of the London bombings of July 7 was documented by victims themselves, coughing in the tube tunnels.

Suddenly the whole business of outside broadcast – the reporter with the furry microphone and his finger in his ear – seemed as old fashioned as the war artist with his box of paints.

Camera phones have become a partial answer to the age-old question:

“Who guards the guards?” A phone has caught out a squad of US marines defiling the bodies of Taliban fighters they had killed. It was phone footage that caught a Metropolitan police officer striking and shoving the harmless drunk Ian Tomlinson to the ground in 2009, resulting in the man’s death.

Official denials are not the impregnable wall they once were thanks to camera phones.

We are using evidence from phone pictures more and more to defend ourselves against car clampers, shoddy hospitals and hotels and all kinds of predatory liars.

So an unalloyed force for good, then? Hardly.

The first arrest of a phone peeping tom came in Swindon in 2004 when a man was arrested in Asda for pointing

his cellphone up women’s skirts.

Then came the “happy slapping” craze when we saw dozens of reports of youths recording violent assaults on their phones for later review and enjoyment.

Privacy has never been the same since camera phones. We love it when they catch famous people doing discreditable things.

Dior’s chief designer John Galliano was caught praising Hitler by a fellow diner in a restaurant and paid the proper price in professional and social annihilation.

Kate Moss was seen snuffling a white powder at a party.

For the working celeb every frownline and every nipple-slip is there to be snapped and sold and we tend to think it serves them right for living off self-publicity.

But disclosure soon slides into nasty voyeurism. Not least for deposed dictators.

Gaddafi’s final torments and Saddam’s messy drop were recorded on camera phone – an intrusion that seems too harsh even for the world’s wickedest men.

The real power of the camera phone is that it’s an equaliser. With it we stand a chance of being believed about what we witness, even if we aren’t important or eloquent.

We might take the next picture that defines an era, just because we’re in the right place at the right time.

And the internet has room for society pages for everyone. With phone in pocket we can’t all be celebs but we can at least be paparazzi to ourselves.